Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars
Bottom Line: Adults just aren’t as interesting as children. Especially when their tale is told as disjointedly as in this movie.
Chapter Two is finally here and you might want to see what I thought of Chapter 1 before you read further.
“It Chapter Two” starts 27 years after Chapter One with a hate crime against two gay adults, one of whom eventually gets killed by Pennywise. They are never talked about or referred to again. I believe this scene is supposed to establish the evils of small towns that Stephen King often encapsulates in his books and to let the audience know that Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) can also feast on adults even though both dangers seems so far removed from the main characters for the rest of the movie. So begins a series of muddled messages that comprise and compromise most of the movie.
There are still plenty of hair raising scares and chills to be had in Chapter 2 and Bill Skarsgård once again proves that he may be the creepiest man on the face of this planet. Even the scares feel a bit disjointed at times, especially when Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) tasks the adults with going it solo to find their “tokens”. The tokens seem kind of random and maybe there are ties to the first movie that I don’t recall, but the frights the adults encounter often don’t seem tied to the tokens or to anything that was previously explained.
The chemistry between the adult characters is also sorely lacking compared to the chemistry of the kids. The only time where the adult chemistry rings true is when they all originally return to Derry and meet for dinner and drinks at a Chinese restaurant, which they then trash with little concern from the other patrons or owners of the restaurant. Then there’s the two love stories that go nowhere. One, is a lover’s triangle that the movie spends a decent amount of time on the three dancing around each other to no real result and the other is a barely hinted homosexual attraction which you would think would be played up a bit more given the beginning of the movie.
Despite being a massive disappointment considering how well done the first movie was, “It Chapter Two” still delivers where you’d expect it to deliver. I just wish there were some way to both do Stephen King justice and keep it to one three hour movie, or heck, even a six part streaming service spectacular. Still, the combination of the two movies did a pretty decent job of bringing a creeptacular book to the creeptacular screen.